This week was pretty neat; our numbers weren't too great (I'll explain more on that later), but I'm learning a ton every day. I don't really have any overarching statements that adequately describe my week, so I'll just get straight to the good stuff. First things first, I noticed that some people have these filled water bottles that are just scattered around in their yards. Elder Hixon said they do it to keep the flies away, so every time we knock on one of those doors, one of us makes a comment of how few flies there are in the yard. I really have no clue if it actually works just because there aren't a whole lot of flies here in the first place.
Once again, this week will not have an investigator of the week because our investigators still can't figure out that going to church is a really important thing; we had two that said they would go, but they didn't wake up until church was pretty much over! Super lame! Once again, that will be our focus this week. Our adventure of the week was actually a whole day; a day I like to call the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. First things first, the second alarm on our phone didn't go off, so we woke up at like 6:45and felt horrible. We still managed to get everything ready for the day, and we figured it would still be a pretty good day; we had a good 7 lessons/appointments planned. Then, during study time, the dueña of our house called. We'd been having some plumbing issues, and she said that a plumber would be coming at 2, right when our first appointment was. "That's okay," we said. "We'll just miss one or two appointments and be okay!" The plumber was there for flippin' 3 and a half hours, and we couldn't leave or anything, so we were just stuck trying to figure out what we could do while he messed around with our pipes on the ceiling. I felt horrible being unable to do anything. We missed half of our appointments and only ended the day with 2 lessons instead of 7. Ugh. So terrible! The morale of the story is that if you wake up late, you're gonna have a bad day. So yeah, that was pretty much the reason why we didn't have a super great week in terms of numbers. I haven't got much time left, so I'll jump right to my spiritual thought for the week. I read a scripture the other day that said, "their knowledge shall condemn them" or something of that sort, and it really made me think about my calling as a missionary. For the people that we contact and/or teach and don't get baptised, all we've done is condemn them in the life to come. When they are given the opportunity to hear the message of the restored gospel in this life and don't take advantage of it, all that that will do is condemn them in the life to come. While thinking about this, I felt a little bad at first, but then I realized that all of the knowledge that I have about the gospel will further condemn me if I don't do everything in my power to share it with everyone. And even so, those people may reject our message now, but that doesn't mean that other missionaries won't come along and turn their hearts. Planting seeds, I tell myself. Every time I get rejected, I'm just planting seeds. Sometimes, that's all we can do. That's all of the time I have for this week, and I can't wait to see what next week brings. Iré y haré. Elder Groesbeck Q&A with Elder Groesbeck 1. Describe your typical day. We wake up at 6:25 pray, and then exercise at 6:30. 7-8 we get ready for the day. 8-9 is personal study. 9-10 is companion study. 10-11 we do "The First Twelve Weeks in the Mission Field" training, and 11-12 is language study. Then from 12 on, we're either teaching people or finding people to teach; lunch is usually at 2, and it's the big meal of the day, so we don't eat again until we get back to the house at 9 or 9:30 and then finish planning for the next day around 10. Then we get ready for bed (write in our journals and eat and what not) until 10:30. 2. You mentioned giving a harvesting blessing last week. Where does that tradition come from? It's not necessarily a tradition, it's just a way to find investigators; the people here are really superstitious, so when they hear that we leave blessings in their homes, they're like, "Yeah! Come on in!" It gives them the chance to see that we're (mostly) normal people. 3. You said you are reading the Liahona magazine. Does the mission provide them or do members give them to you? We get them from the mission office; they have a TON of them in there, so we grab one whenever there's a new issue. 4. In the USA some people will honk, mock or yell at the missionaries as they drive by, do you have or see much of that where you are? Yes, I'll explain a story about that in my blog post. 5. On February 2 I asked you if there were many holidays, and you said they were celebrating one on that day, what were they celebrating? I seriously have no clue what they were celebrating last Monday, but almost everything was closed. 6. Have you had the opportunity to go on splits with any of the members in your ward? What is it like? The jovenes (young men) go out with us all the time; we haven't split up with them yet, mainly because I still can't understand a lot of things people say. It's pretty fun to have them with us, though. There are some of them that really look up to us, and it reminds me of what I thought of the missionaries when I was a kid. 7. When you visit members home do you experience the “missionary effect” (meaning: do little kids go crazy and crawl over you, like you use to do the missionaries)? Usually the kids run off and play while we're teaching; most families don't even eat with us. It's very common to have a restaurant-style dinner in the members' homes where they feed us while they watch TV or talk or whatever. 8. What do you or have you done on preparation-day? We get ready for the week; we haven't done anything super crazy just yet; we had a zone activity last week, which was pretty fun, but other than going out for super-spicy tacos, nothing too interesting on Mondays. We're thinking about going to these old Mayan temples sometime soon on a P-day, but nothing's for sure yet. 9. Have you put on any weight? I think(/hope) I've put on a little bit of muscle just from working out in the mornings, but Elder Hixon weighed as much as I did when he got on the mission, and he's lost about 20 pounds since then.
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